Australian designer Robyn Morris is in a way the plastic surgeon behind Facebook's latest facelift. Source: Supplied

IT'S NOT every day the work you do affects the lives of more than one billion people - unless you're Australian designer Robyn Morris.

After spending seven months "bunkered down in a room" with 15 software engineers in Menlo Park, California, the 32-year-old former Canberran is responsible for Facebook's biggest makeover to date, revealed this morning by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a much hyped press event.

He is, in a manner of speaking, the plastic surgeon behind Facebook's latest facelift.

"When you talk about having over a billion users, it's really exciting. I don't know if there are many places you can design things that have such a broach reach," he said.

Morris' design vision has seen Facebook's news feed - the central plank of the social network - transformed into a slicker, prettier space that relies more heavily on big, rich photos and less on junky advertisements and text.

Rolling out worldwide over the next few months, the aesthetic makeover has so far been well received by critics who have particularly praised it for its neat integration with mobile and tablet devices.

Speaking from Facebook HQ just hours after the launch, Morris sounded remarkably calm for someone whose work is currently being analysed, discussed and pulled apart by the world's media, not to mention a seventh of the planet's population.

It all seems a world away from the mostly self-taught designer's origins in Narooma, three hours south of Canberra, where he originally worked as a journalist at a news monitoring agency.

But to Morris, it's all oddly serendipitous.

"I was working the graveyard shift reading news articles and summarising them and one day I realised this is maybe not what I wanted to do, and I started getting into design," he said.

"It's funny to me because now I'm working on Facebook's news feed and bringing the news to the masses in a way, so it's kind of gone full circle.

"I just put that together the other day actually. It's a really weird full circle sort of thing."

Even working side by side with one of the richest and most powerful men in the world doesn't phase him; to Morris, Zuckerberg is just "a really nice guy".

"Mark is a really nice guy, it's always fun to work with Mark," he said.

"As a product designer I get to work pretty closely with Mark and people have a lot of preconceptions about him, but he's actually a really nice, really genuine guy who really cares about his work."

Now living in San Francisco with his Canberra-born wife Krista de Castella, Morris doesn't get to visit his parents back home all that often, but admits to keeping in touch with them - via Skype.

"We do a lot of Skype, not so much Facebook. My mum is right into Facebook, but my dad is a little cagey, I'm still trying to get him into it," he laughed.

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